Dodge Power Wagon gets new heart

1966 Dodge Power Wagon.

PHOTO: Dale Carleton, National Post

By David Grainger, National Post

Originally published: January 12, 2012

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One of my favourite vehicles is actually a Dodge truck, not a car. When I first started working around vehicles, I fooled around with old military trucks and Jeeps. The reason for this was that they were simple, extraordinarily rugged off-road vehicles and pretty cool. (When I was much younger, my sandbox had been littered with military Dinky Toys.)

My favourite truck, the civilian Dodge Power Wagon, was a thinly disguised military vehicle that rose from the heavy-duty 3/4-ton and one-ton trucks of the Second World War. The first generation was produced from 1946 until the mid-1960s. These trucks were massively overbuilt. When they were more common, it was not unusual to see one customized and festooned with all kinds of equipment such as massive plows, winches or drill rigs that would break the axles of most modern pickup trucks.

A few weeks ago, a wonderful 1966 Power Wagon arrived at my facility. I was delighted because, as much as I love these trucks, this is the first one that had ever arrived here to be worked on. Funnily enough, while it is the first Power Wagon through my shop doors, it is so familiar because of all the Dodge M 37 military pickups and other Second World War Dodges I have owned and worked on. It was rather like an old friend had arrived.

Its condition was excellent although unrestored and, if it was mine, I would keep the old, weathered yellow paint and blacked-out frame and just keep driving it.

When I asked my general manager what the truck was in for, he told me the job was strictly utilitarian and that the owner wanted a modern powerplant installed and a newer transmission with overdrive for the occasional time the truck would be on the road. The frame was to be cleaned, prepped and repainted with a special black anti-oxidizing paint as well.

It turns out this old truck’s working life is not over. It is being prepared to clear land and ready a building site for the owner’s new home. To be better prepared for this, he felt a modern diesel engine might be in order.

I have to admit some personal reluctance here because the flathead six-cylinder that was in the old beast was one of the best-working motors ever built. In some of its incarnations, it was known as the Chrysler Industrial engine. This family of motors powered cars and trucks from the 1930s right through to the ’70s, when they could still be found in tow motors, Zambonis and other heavy equipment.

The engine chosen to replace the original is a Cummins QSB 4.5. This is not a street diesel designed to push a chrome-bedecked urban powder-puff pickup. It is a very serious working motor designed to power heavy agricultural equipment. It would be as happy harvesting thousands of Prairie acres or even sitting at the bottom of a mineshaft pumping out water for a couple of decades.

The installation of this engine and a rebuilt overdrive transmission has caused some trepidation here as they are far from drop-in. The re-engineering of the truck is daunting for the simple reason that we don’t want to change its outward appearance or modify it beyond the point where a restoration back to the original in the future would be next to impossible. That said, among the things we have to do is re-engineer the steering system, since the new engine will occupy the area where the old steering box was located. We also have to radically alter the whole front end, so there will be a number of factors that come into play in creating a new front suspension and steering gear.

The unit that puts power to the front axle and PTO is found on a frame crossmember and is far too close to the new transmission, so we have to create a heavy-duty load-bearing crossmember and move the whole assembly backward about 38 centimetres or so. This will mean we have to make a new front driveshaft as well.

The injection pump on the engine is in the wrong place and the truck’s frame cannot accommodate it at its point of attachment, so we will have to work with engineers at Cummins to relocate that unit.

We have to move the truck’s firewall backward. This worries me as the Power Wagon doesn’t have a lot of legroom to start with. The truck will be no good if the owner can’t get in and out of it and operate the foot pedals easily — especially in a working situation — so we are going to have to be very clever in solving this problem.

As the project progresses, there will be many challenges both large and small that crop up. Cooling is always an issue when blending old and new technologies.

The electrical system in the Power Wagon will have to replaced with a brand new harness and we will have to install all the computers and high-tech required gadgets to run the turbocharged fuel-injected Cummins diesel.

When it is finished, it should be a magnificent truck capable of another 50 years of heavy work and, if we have done our jobs properly, it will look no different than when it first poked its nose into the shop.